Post Mortem of my first compo : The Legend of the Yo-Yo Salesman

This is a post-mortem for my Ludum Dare #32 compo entry, The Legend of the Yo-Yo Salesman.

If you haven’t had a chance to play it yet, PLAY IT HERE

This was my first Ludum Dare entry, and I am very happy with the fact that I was able to submit something. Having failed miserably at my last attempt (#30 – Connected Worlds), I constantly reminded myself this time around to be quick with the ideation process and be more aggressive in cutting down unrealistic features. I think that helped keep the scope small and more focused: hence the successful entry this time!

THE EXPERIENCE

My amazing wife has provided me the freedom to bolt myself in front of the computer throughout the entire weekend. This gave me a staggering 36-hour sleepless window for me to toil away at the game. While I did have a lot of fun chugging energy drinks and writing mountains of bad code with utmost focus, my body is definitely feeling the effects now… I even had to call in sick yesterday (Monday) to catch up on some sleep. My body definitely reacts differently to all-nighters than it did during the college years now that I’m about to enter the 30’s. I believe my future Ludum Dares will definitely include more rest.

The 36 hours really blew past me in the blink of an eye. I had the Friends DVD Season 5 playing when I started the process, and by the time I was finished, an episode from Season 9 was playing. Wow. I don’t have much recollection of exactly how I divvied up the time, so it’s a good thing that I timelapsed the screen as well as had a webcam pointed towards me recording for the entire duration. That’ll by fun to look back to.

I think the most important thing to take away from the experience was that I was having a blast throughout the duration. Everything from coding, drawing, sprite generation, sound effects generation and music composing, I was having a really good time. This is definitely an event that I’ll be taking part of through years to come. I’m very excited.

WHAT WENT WELL

I think the Yo-Yo slinging action platformer concept was a success. It wasn’t a concept that thrilled me during the early ideation phase, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that there was definitely potential for a fun game. There were a few times during the coding phase when I was doubting whether the game would be any fun, but in the end I’m glad that I stuck with it. I think the Yo-Yo behaves in a satisfying and tactically interesting way, allowing for some neat tricks the more you get used to the controls. Well and there’s always the fact that it’s just fun to sling around Yo-Yo’s : )

Sprite animations also came out pretty nicely. I knew that investing time in sprite animations can be a lot of work for very little payoff, but in the end I’m glad that I did it. It gives the game a lot more character and polish.

The fact that many people enjoyed the background music was definitely a pleasant surprise for me. I was scrambling for time and just couldn’t afford to allocate more hours to producing a fantastic music, so I decided to keep any wild musical ideas in check and compose something simple and atmospheric instead. I think that proved to be a step in the right direction.

Lastly, I’m very glad that I picked HaxeFlixel as the platform to build my game upon. Being a website designer by trade, I had been considering a few Javascript platforms to really take advantage of my existing knowledge. While I’m sure platforms such as Phaser.io are fantastic choices, I’m glad I got to really learn and experiment with the amount of power and freedom HaxeFlixel provides. I’ve already ported the game to Windows and it was a breeze with HaxeFlixel. I love it.

WHAT DIDN’T GO SO WELL

Scoping. Even though I had learned my lesson from the previous attempt, it has still hard to fight the exotic ideas from popping up and tempting me. Multiple Yo-Yo’s with different stats, upgrading and customizing the Yo-Yo, special techniques that cost energy have all been cut relatively early. What hurt the most was when I had to strip all story elements from the game. I had such elaborate background details figured out, but just couldn’t find the time to weave any narrative into the game without the other elements suffering.

The fact that the player does not get hurt or die is a disaster, yes. When you play in godmode with no fear for the enemies, it tends to make the game… somewhat really boring. But it actually doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I think I made peace with the fact that the game will ship unfinished, and dedicating more time to fine tune the sound effects and add-in the tutorial text was more fun for me than to implement player collision, life management and game over screen. It’s a shame, but what are you gonna do right?

Even though I mentioned the sprite animation as a positive, it also happened to be the one area that proved costly. 12-frame combined animation for two boss enemies and another 12-frame animation for protagonist running and crouching took away 3-4 hours of my precious time only to be left out of the final product.

Many of the players mentioned that they found the slow-paced action unexciting and off-putting. This was not something that I had anticipated, and it revealed to me the value of player-testing. Tweaking the numbers to make action more rapid and responsive would have required only a small amount of time, so I know now to involve more players earlier into the development phase and collect input from fresh sets of eyes.

CONCLUSION

That was one hell of an experience. No matter how the game ends up scoring in the end, I’d like to consider my first Ludum Dare entry a big personal success. Although my brain is still fizzing from the overload, I’m rather proud of the fact that I was able to push myself and focus on the goal for an amazing 36 hours straight. I do also think the game idea has a lot of potential to be a really fun game, and I’m going to continue to build it and see how far I can take the idea forward.

Big thumbs up for all of fellow participants (such amazing games this round!) and I’ll see you on the next LD jam.

If you haven’t already, please do play and rate my game here